User Reviews

The eponymous character is a cultured, pacifist, loving German young man whose doctor father urged him to fight for the fatherland. He gets the title because his spirit haunts the film — as the heroine Anna's lost love, as the Hofmeisters' lost son and as the kindred spirit his killer, the French solider Adrien, comes to love through his family and their memories.

Himself another cultured, pacifist, loving young man, Adrien seeks out Frantz's grave and family to seek forgiveness for having killed him, albeit in the trenches. As he is so much like Frantz he wins over Anna and Frantz's parents and in turn becomes properly enamoured with her. Though Frantz and Adrien only met in that fatal trench, the narrative posits them as potentially dear friends, perhaps even lovers. That potential was dashed by the war.

Adrien's relationship with Anna is based on his lie: that he was Frantz's dear friend, not his killer. When he tells Anna that truth she hides it from Frantz's parents, to spare them further pain and disillusionment. They cling to the illusion he will replace their son by marrying Anna and reviving Frantz' violin. To preserve their illusion Anna stays in Paris and reports living with Adrien.

In a sane world Frantz and Adrien would have lived the lie to which Adrien retreated: they would have met in Paris and become fast friends. They might've competed for Anna on an equal footing.

But not in this world. As Frantz's father reminds his war-mongering compatriots, fathers send their sons off to war. Though the nations blame each other, it's the fathers' responsibility when the lads are killed.

The film's most obvious theme is how war needlessly fractures the brotherhood of man. After the war the Germans still hate the French, the victorious French the Germans. The hatred renews itself. Set in 1919, the entire drama of renewal and loss plays out under our knowledge that WW II lies ahead. The German discontent and French complacency will shortly reignite with even more catastrophic consequences. If Frantz shadows the scene from the past, the next war looms in the future.

In addition to war, the film is about the equally difficult issues of how to live a full and honourable life. In peace as in war we're challenged to balance truthfulness with the empathetic lie.

Thus Anna tells Adrien she has revealed his lie and guilt to the Hofmeisters. But she hasn't, preferring to save them the renewed pain and another disillusionment. To the end she sustains their illusion that she is living a full life in Paris with Adrien, not wasting away in grief for their Frantz. Where Adrien's lie served himself, hers serves them.

The last scene promises a happy ending, her lie coming true, when she meets another version of Adrien, a fragile lookalike, in the Louvre. As young men on either side are interchangeable as cannon fodder in the war, young men can replace each other in civilian life when their mothers send them off to marriage. Tragically, Adrien doesn't resist his mother's assignment of Fanny, as Frantz couldn't resist his father's dispatch to war.

But with the spirit of life a heart can survive death and loss. A new love can replace a lost. Until the next war, of course, which could well make her a widow, him a casualty.

But that may be the film's most compelling theme: the importance of carrying on with hope and life. Hofmeister means master of hope. Through their mutual attraction Anna and Adrien snap each other out of their emotional paralysis, whether from guilt or grief. They bring each other to life. But as any war story inevitably requires compromise here they can't have each other. They have to settle for other mates.

From Frantz letter on to the visits to the Louvre, the film returns to the Manet painting, The Suicide. A pallid thin man flings back across the bed dead, evoking both Frantz and Adrien — and Anna, who tried to drown herself after losing her illusion of Adrien too. In Manet's image off a despairing passionate death Anna finds encouragement to live.

One of the film's strengths is its detailed realization of the period, not just in setting and costume but in conversation, tone, values and understanding. Especially in the black and white sequences, the film feels like a document of the 1920s, the period between the great, the terrible, wars.

The periodic suffusions of colour serve two functions: they provide an emotional heightening to those particular scenes and they remind us that the film is as much about today as about its historical setting. Perhaps today the bloody fractures involve different nations, and different cultures at war within any of our present nations. But the dashing of hopes and fidelities continues.

"Frantz" is a co-production between Germany and France and this also explains (apart from the story) that both languages are included to some extent in this almost 2-hour movie. Unless you are fluent in both languages, make sure you get a set of good subtitles. This one here is the newest work by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker François Ozon, one of France's finest for sure. The lead performances come from German actress Paula Beer and promising French actor Pierre Niney. And with this (already) award-winning film, both show their potential at times. Still, despite the solid performances, I see this film mostly as a writer's and director's piece for Ozon and this is how I would define it. It is the story of a young woman who meets a man with a mysterious reference to her late boyfriend. And with "late", I am referring to the fact that the film plays right after World War I, so over a century ago, and said boyfriend died in combat. But this is just half the film. When the female protagonist finds out exactly who the male protagonist is, it is far from over, but things actually get more complicated. Anyway, I personally guessed there may be a homosexual relationship involved between the two men, but I was very wrong with that. Talking about the main actors, I felt that Beer occasionally looked like a slightly rougher Rachel McAdams and this is also why sweetheart roles will probably never be her thingey. There has to be something dark and soulful to her characters, but that's perfectly fine. Niney on the other hand to me looked like a mix of Adrien Brody and one of the Boardwalk Empire actors whose name I cannot remember right now.

This film is (fittingly with the time when it plays) in black-and-white. However, there are some moments of color and Ozon used these mostly to show a promising, somewhat optimistic moment and when things got worse again or bleaker again, then he quickly returned to the standard black-and-white. It's personal preference how much you like his approach there. I myself thought it was okay without being too overwhelmed by this creative decision. The acting overall was fairly good. German audiences will see a handful familiar faces too, such as Johann von Bülow's for example. As a whole I enjoyed the watch. I was not totally impressed and I would not mention this as one of my favorites from 2016, but the film certainly had its convincing moments. I quite liked the singing in the French pub as this scene made it obvious for the main character to be an outsider as well while, for everything before that the French male character was the one on the outside. And I liked that Ozon did not go for a kitschy happy ending as there were admittedly here and there some scenes that were slightly kitschy already. But in terms of degree and quantity, it is all very bearable. The very last scene was an uplifting one and I guess the director wanted his audience to leave the theater on a positive note with a bit of a smile on their lips and not in a too depressing state, even if he had to sacrifice a bit of realism for a feel-good moment there. But honestly, the film could have become much darker even with the suicide of one of the two main characters that was definitely an option looking at how many times the suicide-related painting was reference. Okay, enough now. I enjoyed the watch and I recommend seeing it, especially if you like historic films about the first half of the 20th century or just German/French films in general. You will not regret the watch in that scenario.

One of the downsides of the world of Theatre and Film is the way it inspires journeymen to think they are capable not only of standing comparison with but actually eclipsing their betters and being encouraged by those who should know better. In 2011 we had the very lacklustre Terence Davies kidding himself that he could write a better version of The Deep Blue Sea than its onlie begetter Terence Rattigan and the fact that the resulting film was a joke did little or nothing to prevent the BFI genuflecting at the very mention of his name. Now we have Francois Ozon stepping into the ring with Ernst Lubitsch who, in 1932, turned out an exquisite film, Broken Lullaby, on the futility of war. Ozon, completely unable to lay a glove on Lubitsch, settles for shooting Paula Beer in solitude surrounded by vast, empty landscapes, which is of course nice enough to look at but remains light years short of the 'Ozon touch' to which he clearly aspires. In Ozon's favour there are probably thousands of film goers who won't be aware of Broken Lullaby and will therefore find Frantz half decent.

Great photography and actors and first 3/4 of the story. I would have given it an 8 or 9 but I intensely disliked the ending. Can't directors ever uplift us? I'm actually sorry I watched it. I suppose that saying this is a spoiler.

François Ozon's latest movie Frantz packs in audience pleasers: superb black-and-white photography of spellbinding locations; nonstop suspense; brilliant character portrayals by Paula Beer as Anna and Pierre Niney as Adrien; the subject of war's pointlessness; the right or wrong of lies; and human psychology when it comes to love. This last and most compelling aspect of the movie, discussed below, is for a post-viewing conversation (i.e., this review may be a spoiler). The movie begins in Quedlinburg, Germany, after World War I, with the Hoffmeister family grieving for the loss of Frantz, Magda and Hans' son and Anna's fiancée. The three live together, Anna already like a daughter to Frantz's parents. Hans and the Germans in town bitterly hate the French for killing their sons. Frenchman Adrien Rivoire shows up to lay flowers on Frantz's grave and as a result meets Anna who brings him home to her surrogate parents. Over time, Frantz's parents come to love and cling to Adrien for his past friendship in Paris to their lost son. Adrien becomes a living embodiment of Frantz, keeping him alive for the parents. It helps that Adrien comes from the same cultured class as the Hoffmeisters—he formerly played violin in a prominent Paris orchestra. Adrien's last name Rivoire is too close to the French word revoir—to see again—not to have special meaning for Adrien's role in this story. Love comes in all shapes and sizes. Anna and Adrien's love presents the movie's most fascinating content. Adrien, caught in the difficult situation of meeting Frantz's parents (with the postwar Germans and French hating each other), weaves more and more lies about his friendship to their son. Adrien's a meek, malleable person, which becomes his character flaw in the end when he goes along with his mother's choice for a wife. He has no mettle, no courage, and chooses an easier path controlled by others. In Quedlinburg, spending time with the Hoffmeisters and learning about Frantz's past, Adrien becomes part of the family. When he finally confesses to Anna what really happened in the battle trenches, she's naturally devastated. But she doesn't reveal the truth to Frantz's parents—she spares them yet another grief, this one involving Adrian's travesty. Here the movie lets us ponder lies—Adrien's lies, Anna's decision to keep up his lies, and what the future will be for her maintaining and further developing them for the remainder of the Hoffmeisters' lives. Are some lies acceptable? To what extent? Can Anna ever live a fulfilling life if she perpetrates serious lies? So many people, so many families, live out their lives harboring such secrets and lies, and Anna's case is but one example. After Anna has learned the horrible truth from Adrien, she must begin all over in her nascent love for him, and succeeds. Once she has forgiven him—which entails understanding the stupidity of war, where one soldier in a trench has no choice but to kill his enemy or be killed—she allows her love to rekindle. But what shape and size is Anna's love? It's one of life's more mysterious forms, where the young woman loves the very person who killed her lover; it's a love that encompasses the killer's connection to the past love, a strange mix but real and food for thought. The same is true for Adrien: he loves the woman of the man he killed as if, again, Frantz's taken life can resurrect permanently through the new bond. It's a love triangle of a warped sort. The Hoffmeisters also want the Anna-Adrien union for the same reason—the men's supposed bond of yore joined to Anna now will keep Frantz forever within the living family. Weird, but not weird, precisely because love has so many faces. A few other points about the movie: The parallel structure of Adrien experiencing German hatred in Quedlinburg, and then Anna, in part two, experiencing anti-German behavior in France, works to emphasize the antiwar message. Plus we are told a few times that Frantz, like Adrien, was a pacifist. Indeed, his rifle in the trench where he died was not loaded. He would rather be killed than kill. The score by Philippe Rombi sets the mood for every scene and the film's nonstop suspense, but it never intrudes on the action. Its apt subtlety achieves perfection. Finally, at those rare moments where joy in nature or the good things in life occur, the movie switches to color, briefly, like the quick glows we all experience in life. Then the story returns to the black and white of the war's bleak aftermath, not unlike Italian neorealism except for the sumptuous quality of this movie's cinematography. Manet's painting Le Suicidé (The Suicide) comes up several times. It relates directly to Anna and Adrien's mental destitution about the truth of what happened to Frantz. However, it's not answered why this painting was one of Frantz's favorites, nor why Anna visits it at the end of the movie when she's embarking on her "freed" life in full blooming color. The man viewing the painting on the bench beside to her is just like Adrien—sensitive, effete, melancholy. Are the two sitting there before a depiction of suicide to show their contrast—Anna no longer tied to Frantz or the past and the man dealing with suicidal thoughts? Or, is it suggested that Anna's past will link these two strangers in an uncanny love? Will Anna connect to him because he's like Adrien, who in turn was the embodiment of Frantz? Love and human psychology are the tantalizing material of this film.

It's 1919, immediately after World War I murdered of so many of Europe's young. In a small German town, the mysterious appearance of flowers on the grave of a young German soldier ignites the curiosity of his grieving fiancé, Anna (Beer) who finds them. When she tells the dead boy's shattered parents, they connect the flowers to the young Frenchman, Adrien (Niney), with whom the doctor had refused to speak because of his bitterness about the loss of his only son.

The story that unfolds is a fascinating vignette of side-by-side civilisations in the wake of incomprehensible barbarity perpetrated by and on each other's children, at the behest of their parents.

This is a massive story, elicited via the fascinating device of a haunted young man's search for redemption and a young girl's ability to contemplate it. The settings, costume and characters, coupled with the use of sepia film tones are highly evocative of the era and I felt utterly immersed in the enormous insanity of that four year crime, in whose shame-riddled aftermath the world was desperately trying to pretend there was a normalcy to which it could ever return.